Spoiler Alert: This story contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Season 3 of Tell Me Rise, currently streaming on Hulu.
Just when you thought “Tell Me Lies” couldn’t get any more toxic, Hulu has removed the first three episodes of season three. When the group returns to Baird College after Christmas break, things become chaotic almost immediately. Pippa (Sonia Mena) and Wrigley (Spencer House) are together again, but she is also now sleeping with Diana (Alicia Crowder). After witnessing his brother’s death last season, Wrigley seems to be the only one keeping his head straight. Helping him along is his new friendship with Bree (Catherine Missal). The two bond while taking MDMA and have an unexpected sleepover at a bus stop. To keep him busy, they also take photography classes together, and they actually seem to be enjoying it.
“In a friend group, you always have people who spend a lot of time in the same space, but you’re never alone. When you join a friend group, you realize that I’ve never really had a private conversation with that person. So they know each other, but they don’t know each other on a personal level,” says showrunner Megan Oppenheimer. “In Season 3, they are in many ways the most deeply traumatized people in their lives. I’ve always loved stories where people at the lowest of lows connect and find solace in each other and find a surprisingly safe place with another person, so that felt very natural to me.”
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However, Bree is not doing well in her post-Oliver (Tom Ellis) spiral. Additionally, Evan (Branden Cook) has now realized that Oliver is the older man she was sleeping with. At the end of season 2, Oppenheimer told Variety that he had no intention of bringing Ellis back for season 3…but once she started taking seasons off, things changed.
“I still had a lot of questions that people were asking me, and I didn’t want to leave any potential conflicts open,” she explains. “And we never had him and Evan at odds and it felt like we wasted potential. So it made sense to bring him back, but not in such a front-and-center way. It felt unrealistic that he wouldn’t have some kind of interaction just a few weeks after something like that happened. He and Branden are really good friends, so it was nice to be able to give them a little bit of something together!”
On Lucy (Grace Van Patten) and Stephen’s (Jackson White) side, they do it all over again for about five minutes. He waits for her to come clean about Evan, but when she doesn’t, he breaks up with her. Soon, he begins threatening to tell Bree and decides to blackmail her after forcing her to record a video in which he admits to lying about being sexually assaulted last semester. Lucy is so shocked that she has a panic attack.
“This season, she starts to become estranged. She’s someone who has always struggled with her mental health ever since her father died. We talked about maybe in Season 1 that she was depressed and numb, and I think she is,” Oppenheimer says. “I think this is the truth of what she was going through in Season 1, and that made her an easy target for this unhealthy relationship. You’re looking at someone who doesn’t have the tools to deal with it and doesn’t have adult support.”
The executive producer said that given what Lucy has been through recently, this “felt like an honest outcome for her, where she’s finally at a disconnection where her insides can’t cope with what’s going on in the outside world and she’s literally disconnected and the fractures start to occur.”
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To distract herself, Lucy contacts Alex (Costa D’Angelo), a kind-hearted campus drug dealer who happened to have grown up in foster care with Bree.
“The idea of adopting someone from her foster family was always in the back of my mind. I didn’t know what form that would take, but it was a natural progression to adopt someone with a connection to Lucy,” Oppeneheim says. Alex’s backstory is revealed more as the season progresses, but at the end of the third episode, Lucy and Alex have sex so intense that she asks him to call her pathetic.
“On paper, this character was much more difficult, and Costa came in so vulnerable, so hurt, that for me he was blown off the screen,” says Oppenheimer. The series has featured explicit love scenes over the past two seasons, but Oppenheimer was shocked when he saw the final cut of Alex and Lucy’s scene at the end of season 3, saying, “I thought they were really doing it. I’ll see what people say. I thought they both did a really good job in that scene. I thought it was beautiful and I’ve never seen anything like it.”
